Who Needs The Desktop? Save To Google Drive

Google is increasing the temptation to keep all of oneâ€™s files inside of Google Drive. Today it rolled out a new Chrome browser extension to save images, links, and other items directly into Google Drive with one mouse click.

This eliminates the need to save something to a Downloads folder or the desktop. To enable this, grab the Save to Drive extension from the Chrome Web store.

This also makes it extremely useful for those that bounce back and forth between two computers. No need to make sure you email the file to yourself or move it to a cloud service like Dropbox. If one of your computers happens to be a Chromebook, even better. No need to upload a series of files into your Drive before heading out the door with your cloud-powered laptop.

When you right or control click on an image you have the option of saving the entire file to Google Drive or just the URL. Options allow you to save the image as a .png, HTML source, or Google document among other technical options.

I particularly like how one click to the Google Drive icon in the browser to save the entire contents of one web page into Drive. Zoom in and out of the image once it has been saved. Images also have a commenting feature, which sets up a nice system for collaboration.

The new save-to-drive extension is another step in Googleâ€™s effort to build Drive into a full-featured desktop/office suite. It is a necessary component of the companyâ€™s cloud-based computing future. Googleâ€™s vision is that all computing can be done from the cloud, enabling for an ease of collaboration and data security (no crashed hard drives to worry about). Building a series of services that are slick, cool, and reliable are essential for this to be an attractive option.

It also relates to how CEO Larry Page described this vision in last quarterâ€™s conference call: speaking about Chrome, he lauded how one could essentially have the same content available across multiple screens. Such is the goal for Google’s operating system.

Of course, we are not yet there. Gmail was down just the other day, and there are of course many who are not entirely comfortable handing over all of their essential data to one company. For those keeping score, Google can now save all your email, contacts, documents, images, music, books, browsing and location history.

In many ways it is currently a worthy tradeoff. The future will tell if it remains that way.